Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Civil War Symptoms? Minnesota Meltdown, Alex Pretti, China’s Attempted Coup Drama & Iran on Edge | Tom Bilyeu Show Live
28 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Good morning, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Tom Bilyeu Show Live. This was an insane weekend that had me very hesitant to actually begin planning for today's episode. I had been hearing rumors of everything that was shaking down.
And yeah, diving into it all at once, it really did feel like a everyone, everywhere, all at once kind of moment where there are so many different parts of the world order, world stability. just beginning to fray at the edges. It's getting pretty wild. Minneapolis is on the brink of total collapse in the wake of the ice shooting and killing of Alex Preti.
Barricades have been set up, agents have been bloodied, and hotels suspected of housing ice agents have been put under siege by violent mobs. Governor Walz has deployed the National Guard at the request of Minneapolis Mayor Fry to help keep the peace... But they're simultaneously calling for continued resistance.
Besson signals that he's willing to devalue the dollar as a weapon in the global trade war. We'll see how far that's going to go, but there's so much happening right now in Japan. Rumors are flying that Xi Jinping's most recent purge of the Chinese military has resulted in a failed coup attempt. You heard that one right. Details are coming out. They are very sporadic and they are very confused.
So this is going to be one that... Not only are we going to cover today, but I imagine we're going to be covering a lot in the future. So keep your eyes on China.
Speaking of keeping your eyes on China, Mamdani is making it clear that illegal immigrants do in fact get taxpayer dollars in New York City and they will not cooperate with ICE because the model playing out in Minneapolis is so wonderful. Why wouldn't you want to mimic it? Drew, this was a wild one. This is one where I am realizing just how fragile the entire global ecosystem really is.
And seeing everything fraying here in the US at the same time that it's fraying everywhere. We've talked a lot about this. All of these forces are intertwined. They are all economic in nature. But somehow, man, when you... hit that black ice and the back end of your car kicks out, you really realize how fast you're traveling and how dangerous things really are.
So, yeah, keeping your eyes on the dollar, which is going down Japanese yen, which is wildly unstable. Obviously, everything going on in Minnesota, it's wild.
yeah oh and i didn't even mention the fact that a carrier strike group has arrived in iran like the the list of things to cover is way too is getting crazy um we need that uh dj khaled button another one because ice just got another one just another one another one and just keep pressing not too soon um all right let's grab this i hate how both funny and appropriate that is
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Chapter 2: What happened in Minneapolis following the ICE shooting of Alex Pretti?
Cause that's definitely the thing we need to talk about. Yeah. Uh, it wasn't good. It remains not good, but to lay down the facts on January 24th, Alex pretty, a 37 year old ICU nurse at a Minneapolis VA hospital was shot and killed by ice agents in the back, by the way, during an immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis.
Bystander videos make it pretty clear, and there's so many of them coming out. And they show that Pretty himself was filming the federal agents as they made their way down the street on foot. The situation escalated when an agent shoved a woman to the ground. Pretty stepped in to assist her, putting his arm around her, at which point agents pepper spray and grab him and force him to the ground.
While Preddy was pinned to the ground by several agents, video pretty clearly shows the following. We're going to show some of this, but not all of it for reasons that'll be obvious. But Preddy was holding a cell phone in his right hand.
An agent finds and removes, that's an important part of this story, an agent finds and removes a handgun from Preddy's waistband, basically that it tucked in his back. That agent then quickly turns around and walks off with the gun. Very shortly after that, as Preti continues to struggle, which we will certainly talk about that part of it.
Agents fire at least 10 shots over roughly five seconds, killing Preddy right where he lay.
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Chapter 3: How is the U.S. responding to escalating tensions in Minneapolis?
And if my read of the videos is accurate, the first shots go into his back, man. It is horrific. And with the ability to watch the video over and over in slow motion, It seems like Pretty is not only shot after being disarmed, but as I said, shot in the back multiple times. Needless to say, the narrative battle of what actually happened is raging.
If you've seen the footage, it is very easy to understand why people are absolutely aghast at this shooting. From where I'm sitting, the shooting is completely unjustified. The man was disarmed and yes, he was resisting, which for my money is absolutely lunatic behavior. However, shooting him full stop is horrific, but shooting him in the back is ghoulish. It is completely unforgivable.
But as with so many things, as more and more detailed analysis kept coming out over the weekend, after the ridiculous claims that he was wielding a weapon, that he was aggressively threatening ICE agents with a gun, as all of that evaporated, a new narrative began to gain traction, namely that the gun that was removed from Preti allegedly misfired as the ICE agent whisked it away.
And it was the sound of the first shot that made the ice officer shoot Preti thinking he had a gun and was firing. Now, if you've seen the video, given how clumsy, jittery and untrained the whole debacle looked, I would not be surprised if that's what happened. That doesn't mean that this is OK.
It just means that the horrific, tragic sequence of events may have included the misfiring of the gun. Now, if you watch the video in slow motion, it really does look like the gun may have accidentally discharged. Additionally, there are unverified reports that the gun was a Sig Sauer, a gun with multiple lawsuits alleging that it misfired.
Now, at this point, I know the FBI has the gun in custody, so that might have been verified at this point. We'll have to look that up. But apparently, despite the Sig Sauer themselves, the company, denying that the gun has any issues.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of Xi Jinping's military purge in China?
It is an open secret, apparently, in the gun community that that particular gun will discharge without the trigger being pulled. Obviously very rare, but seems to happen. Now, regardless of whether the shooting ends up being incompetence or malice, it's shaping up to be the spark that lights all of the dynamite bundled up in Minnesota.
And I am expecting things to continue to escalate from here, especially all the things that we've seen with the coordination, the instruction manuals on how to track and disrupt ice, all of the signal groups that were infiltrated. So we see just how much coordination there is.
If I can bring a little Mike Benz to all of this, Mike Benz's read that NGOs have been specifically using tactics like this. First, it was the CIA doing this kind of stuff abroad. Now, NGOs bringing this in to domestic use. So all of that is going to be coming out as well.
But this is an unmitigated disaster and ultimately it's going to be up to all of us to slow this down, to try to find ways to de-escalate, to hopefully convince Trump that you cannot just keep pushing this forward. You can't keep escalating You can't just keep hammering people until morale improves like that isn't going to work, especially not if this is an organized resistance.
And I understand there are going to be people on the right whose inclination is one of emotion that you just you can't let people get away with this, that you have to hammer them down. You absolutely have to get law and order back in place. There is no doubt about that. But you've got to get law and order on the back of cooperation with local organizations. state government.
I think the reason that we're seeing all of this pop off in Minnesota and not elsewhere is multivariate. We're going to be talking about the depth of the fraud and all of that. But I think a big part of the reason that you're seeing this escalation in Minnesota is because we don't have that cooperation.
And if the federal government makes the mistake of having an only up escalatory response, then the people are going to be justified more and more for pushing back. Remember, we have a second amendment in this country for a reason. We had a founding father who believed
and stated very clearly that liberty is secured or must be watered, I think was the exact quote, must be watered by the blood of patriots and the tyrannical alike. So this is one of those things where you've got a nation with a history of using weapons to stand up against tyrannical governments. You have it baked into our DNA.
And so if you just use the hammer, then you're going to see further and further escalation and people are going to needlessly die. So while I think it is insane to resist arrest, at the same time, I think it is insane to send a roving band of
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Chapter 5: How does the global economy impact local unrest in the U.S.?
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Chapter 6: What are the potential consequences of military action in Iran?
Let's get right back into the action.
It seems like on the surface level, this is, you know, ICE is a gangster killing civilians and they're unmasked men terrorizing communities. But do you think that this is deeper? Like, is this our modern day civil war? Is there something, you know, is it an insurrection? What's kind of your general read on the totality of what's going on, not just in Minnesota, but in America, period?
We are a strange species. and once people understand that we are evolutionarily shaped to be a social creature and that i believe the way that you achieve balance in a social animal is you have to have different roles and different people keep things in check so everything from chronotype why some people want to stay up late Why other people get up early?
Well, if you put us all together as a village, the late night people stay up for ages and then the morning people wake up really early and you've more or less got 24 hour coverage. When you think about the left and the right divide, something that I've talked a lot about, you've got people that really believe in compassion, incredible. Incredibly beneficial to social cohesion.
And then you have people that believe in social responsibility. It's the way that you deal with the game theoretic of you'll get the bottom feeders that are going to do nothing and just reap the rewards of the compassion. And so they won't contribute to the group. And so all of that stuff becomes incredibly beneficial. important to getting human civilization to the point that it's at.
But it has all of these weird ways that it manifests. I say all of that because I believe that for a very long I believe that humans are such that there are always elements that believe that the country, whatever country, is balanced in the wrong direction and they are trying to undermine that country at all times. This is what you see going on in China. So here you have the Reds win.
And I liken Mamdani to China because he has the same impulses that this needs to be top down. We're going to take care of everybody. Don't worry if we have to like break some things. No big deal. It's how you get stability. I think that's inherent to humans. I don't think that's inherent to China or America. It's just humans have this bifurcation.
And this is why you see these debates over what type of society we should have. So within America for a very long time, there have been people that want to see capitalism. And modern technology has allowed for a level of cooperation that we've never seen before.
And so I think that the slow march through the institutions, as they call it, which is a very Marxist idea, has been going on for decades. And we're now seeing it manifest in the extreme in Minnesota. And I think that there are a lot of things tied from people that believe that borders should be open because this is stolen land and nobody's illegal.
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Chapter 7: How is the Japanese yen affecting global markets?
Now, when I look at California, is it possible that California is just so much bigger, so much more diverse, so many different interest groups that it's just harder to get momentum going here? Maybe. I don't know. We'll see. I think there's also something to in. Los Angeles or in California, this is hypothesis, hypothesis.
But in California, some of the strongest pushback against illegal immigration comes from Mexican immigrants. And so you've got Mexican immigrants are like, bro, I did this the hard way. I did this the right way. I got here legally. I've done the thing. I've worked my ass off. I've been a part of the fabric of this city and this country. for, in some cases, decades.
It's like, I've raised my kids here. I wanted a better life for them. I wanted them to be American. So there's less momentum that you're able to get by whipping them up into a frenzy in the way that you can the Somali population who's newer here, who, if is true, is coordinated and acting like a block. There's far fewer of them.
There was an estimate that I saw that there's only 130,000 illegal immigrants in Minnesota compared to millions in California. So It again, hypothesis easier to organize, easier to get them to move as one unit, more clear leadership hypothesis, allegedly no idea if this is true, but Ilhan Omar as the sort of like top person that's able to coordinate.
I'm trying to coordinate because I feel like there's a lot of things there. So are you saying that it's happening in Minnesota because the Somalis are organizing the protest?
Or I don't I don't. believe that they are organizing the protests. I think that's down to the community organizers. You're just saying they, as a voting block? They move as a block. So you've got a group of people who are like, okay, we need to act in a coordinated fashion.
Then you get community organizers, members of the government, whatever, coming to them and saying, okay, cool, here's the playbook. Like in the signal chats, there is- Can we just close it and restart it? There's at least one member
of the waltz administration that is a part of these um community organization groups that are pushing back against ice so does that mean that tim walsh is involved no it does not but does it mean that there are members of the government that are involved yes it does so um now again i don't have any information that other people don't have so i want to be very clear about the level of speculation here people need to be very careful um but that is
one potential reason why this is happening in Minnesota in a way that it's not happening elsewhere. And so the question becomes, if there is a similar level of systemic fraud happening in California, will it suddenly create the same kind of pushback as that begins to become uncovered?
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Chapter 8: What role do NGOs play in the current protests and resistance movements?
ICE agents get 12 days of training and a pat on the back of the Capri Sun. And then now we're saying that the victim should have had his composure, should have been kept up. When the reason that the victim was even involved in the first place is because they pushed the woman in pepper sprayer. So he jumped in the middle to kind of help the woman. Then they have him back. He's on all fours.
They're on his back. And you're saying that he's resisting. We got a UFC fighter in the room. I don't know how much more tame you can be in that position. So again, the guy who we're saying he should have done, he should have done, it doesn't matter. His accountability is he's dead. So that's what happened.
But I just want to say in the law of court, in the land of the free, in the home of the brave, in the justice system that we all hang our hat on, that we're not like all these other third world countries, we're civilized, we're a progressive organization because we have justice, we have courts, we have law, and we have order. He didn't get his day in court.
He didn't get his day in front of the judge. He didn't get his side of the story. We have a bunch of people looking at videos from different angles saying he had a gun. He didn't have a gun. It was his phone. He shot a gun. There was a misfire. All these other things that are happening. It doesn't matter what you want to say about him because he's dead.
So whatever, whether he did it right or wrong, he's dead. It doesn't matter. Now, the ICE agents. Just killed somebody a couple weeks ago. Where was the accountability? Where was happening? Nothing. You can act with impunity. Don't worry about it. Just do your own thing. So now they killed somebody else. And what's going to happen after this one? It's cool. You're right. They're wrong.
Go get the illegals. Cool. So then this is going to happen again. So we can spend 20 minutes talking about he should have did this. He should have been in all fours. He should have been in the fetal position. It doesn't matter. He's dead. Let's talk about the ICE agent that killed him. And let's talk about the other ICE agent that killed that other person.
And let's talk about how these things are now starting to be tied up together. You're a businessman, you're an entrepreneur. Everybody knows about the 80-20 rule. You're spending 20% of your time, you're spending 80% of your time trying to go after 20% of the illegals. There's a million illegals in California. There's a million illegals in Texas.
If Minnesota is not even cooperating, withdraw from Minnesota, just like you withdrew from L.A., Sue them, law order them, say you're impeding progress, put Governor Walz in jail. Do these things that the legal process is for. The country was founded on a bunch of lawyers. The Constitution, the Declaration of Independence was a bunch of people arguing in the courtroom.
That's how these documents got formed. So Trump wants to call like lawfare and all these other things to throw the people that don't vote for him in jail. But when it comes to what he actually should be like suing for, he should be suing Democrats. Tim Walz, Tim Walz should be in front of Senate and they already did that. So, okay, get Tim Walz in front of Senate, have him accountable.
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